Why Do Readers Love Some Novels? Results of a Survey

Barbara is the author of the groundbreaking book on nurturing out-of-the-box children, When the Labels Don’t Fit. She is also a researcher and clinician living on a historic dirt road in New York’s Hudson Valley. She holds a PhD in clinical social work and is a frequent guest essayist on major online writing sites. Her debut novel, Queen of the Owls, will release in the spring of 2020.

It’s the very question that we, as fiction writers, should be asking readers. But as far as I could tell, no one had.

My writing BFF and I had gotten ourselves into a pretzel trying to figure out the difference between premise, theme, story question, arc, and tagline when another part of my brain kicked in and said, “Wait! We’re thinking like technicians, not like readers.”

Readers don’t make all those distinctions. They just want—well, what do they want?

Before I turned to fiction, I was a qualitative researcher. As Brene Brown said in her well-known TED Talk, qualitative researchers are storytellers, offering “data with a soul.” From my experience designing, conducting, teaching, and writing about qualitative research, I know that it begins with two things. First, picking the right question. And second, asking the right people. When I wanted to understand the experience of mental illness, I asked people who’d been living with it: “What’s it like for you?” If I wanted to understand what people enjoy eating, I’d have to ask the eaters, not the cooks. You get the idea.

Thus, this project was born.

I decided to do a simple voluntary survey consisting of one open-ended question: What makes you love a novel? I posted the question on eight Facebook groups for readers, letting people know that they could write whatever they liked, without having to choose from predefined categories such as hook, voice, etc.

Within three days, I’d gotten 152 responses. In research, it’s always good to do a second round of data collection, if only to check in: “Did I get it right? Did I miss anything?” So I posted a follow-up, summarizing what I’d learned and offering another chance to reply. That gave me an additional 21 responses, bringing the total to 173.

Obviously, these 173 people don’t represent all the readers in the world, but they do represent those who care enough about books to join an online community, think about what they read, and take the time to make their views public. They deserve to be heard.

If this were an academic article, I’d provide all my tabulations and tables. It isn’t, so I won’t. I’ll get right to the highlights. Note: The percentages below refer to ideas, not people—that is, how often the idea was expressed. Most people made more than one point, so each of their points was counted separately.

So what did I discover?

The most frequently cited reasons for loving a novel were:

The characters, including their interactions (24%)Specifically, within the category of “characters”:Well developed, authentic/relatable characters (11.4%)Emotional connection/caring about the characters (5%)

A great storyline, with plenty of twists and turns (11.5%)

The experience of immersion and emotional engagement (9%)

A chance to learn something new/made me think (6.3%)

The quality of the writing, including the voice (6%)

Other elements included good dialogue, humor, an evocative setting, and a satisfying ending.

Most of all, it was the bond with the characters, the immersion in the world of the story—needing to know how it all turns out. No surprise, given that we’re talking about fiction.

The question What makes you love a novel? is, of course, a reflective one, a retrospective look after you’ve finished the book. I didn’t ask, “What made you pick up the book in the first place?” I did expect, however, that responses would span three points in time:

Initial encounter: Is the book grabbing my interest? Can I tell that I’m going to love it, right from the beginning?

Throughout: Is the book sustaining my interest? Do I want to keep reading, all the way to the end?

Afterward: Do I think about it later? remember it? recommend it?

We’re told how crucial that “first impression” is—in fact, that’s all we typically get of an agent’s attention before a judgment is made—so I was curious to see how often people mentioned that initial connection, as compared to their experience at the other two points.

To my surprise, among the 493 “bits of data” that I collected from 173 respondents, there were only 12 references to the importance of that early “grab.” In contrast to what we’re told about agents, only 5 out of 173 readers said this had to happen on page one. Everyone else said it happened later, while they were reading—or later still, after they’d finished.

When we feel something about a story, during and afterward, it means the story mattered to us. We might talk about it on social media, recommend it to a friend, buy another book by the same author. It might even change us in an important way. Isn’t that our goal, as writers? Not just a good first impression, but a meaningful relationship.

One other point, worth noting. A number of people volunteered information about what they did not love—that is, reasons they stopped reading. Several said they disliked long wordy descriptions; others disliked devices such as multiple time lines or points of view, which they found confusing and disruptive, breaking the flow. A straightforward, emotionally compelling, and interesting story—that was what they liked, not a sophisticated structure.

So what do we make of all this?

On the one hand, some of these findings dovetail with what we might expect. On the other hand, they’re disturbing because of the disparity between what writers care about, what agents care about, and what readers care about.

What matters to writers are the things we’re taught about goal, motivation, inciting incident, stakes, crucible, crisis, and so on. What matters to agents is whatever they glean from a query letter or the first few pages of a manuscript—that quick initial spark (or its absence). Anecdotal reports are pretty consistent on this point: an agent makes a judgment to stop reading after the first or second page.

But that’s not what most readers do; 93% take a lot longer to decide.

If this survey is a good indication, we’re left with an odd situation. The things that make readers love a book don’t necessarily correspond to the things that writers and agents value—or is it simply that the timing is different?

What do you think of these findings? Do they seem accurate? Do you, as a reader, feel the same way, or do you love books for different reasons than those cited in the study? What should we, as writers, do about the apparent disconnection between the experience of these three groups? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Comments

For years I—thought—I—was—crazy. For years writing advice told me to grab the reader on the first page or they were gone. Drawing upon my reading experience, I assumed I was an exception. As a reader, unless a book was failing to meet minimum standards early I gave it until the end of the first chapter when I’d expect to be hooked.

That isn’t to say I’d read ten pages of someone eating their breakfast. Yes, I wanted a sense that the chapter was building towards something satisfying.

Thing is, maybe the reader/writer results aren’t that far apart. Maybe it’s about perception. When I write, the first paragraph is dangling the hook, the first page getting them to bite, and the end of the chapter reeling them in. Before I was writing I wouldn’t have recognized what was happening early that was pulling me along to chapter’s end.

It’s interesting that, as a writer, you now have a better understanding of what was taking place in you, as a reader. It seems clear that reading a lot helps us to be better writers; do you think that writing a lot helps us to be better readers? The force that was pulling you along to the end of the chapter could be many things, of course. Voice, character, setting, etc., not just that “dangling hook” of a Big Story Question. Interesting thoughts, Christina! Thank you!

This is a fascinating survey – and a valuable one! That agents are out of sync with writers isn’t much of a mystery. It would be nice if things were different, but that might be too much to ask for. That they are out of touch with readers, is a calamity for writers.
It’s probably true that agents are in sync only with publishers and that THEY are the ones who are truly out of touch with those who buy and read novels.

Such an interesting question, isn’t it? If we’re all making decisions based on what we believe The Other Guy wants or likes, in a series of steps, like links in chain… then where is a reliable starting point from which the rest ensues? There seem to be a whole lot of assumptions here! Like all assumptions, they’re worth revisiting! What’s valued (popular? commercially successful? award-winning?) in one era isn’t always valued in another era. So it’s probably a situation in flux … Maybe it’s time for a new model …

I think that disconnect between agents and readers and writers started when publishing was no longer driven by the editorial board but by marketing. I remember editors lamenting in the late 80s that they could no longer love a book and be confident it could go all the way through the decision-making process with a green light. Marketing muddied up the waters. Sigh…

Finding a way to engage in marketing without losing our creative spirit is a big problem for writers. To get our published work to find the love and acclimation it deserves, we need marketing to attract people to our book, but it can only deal with the initial encounter or whether the book grabs interest and makes a community of readers feel that they are going to love it. To maintain our creative spirit, we need to learn how marketing can fit in with us, rather than letting it make us fit in with it. Good luck!

It’s instructive and compelling to hear that readers, writers and agents have different reasons for loving a book. I can’t speak to the accuracy of your findings, but my gut tells me that they have validity. That said, we are each (writer, reader, agent) coming at any book with a different agenda. And while your survey makes this issue somewhat quantifiable, I’d have to factor in the magic; the muse touching the writer, the writer finding his or her way to the nugget of gold in the story, the agent seeing the glimmer, and the reader connecting with it all. Wonderful post!!

Thank you, Susan—and thank you for pointing out that there is always that unknown element that can’t be captured in a survey. We try to put something into words, reasons, explanations, but sometimes it’s more about a deep resonance. For me, I don’t always know which books I love until I realize that I’m still thinking about them, months later.

Interesting results! I’m glad I’m not alone by never giving up on a book after the first page. But I’m not sure I’d interpret these results to say that readers and writers are so different about the rest of it. The readers want compelling characters they care about and interesting storylines. The way writers accomplish that is with all those ingredients and techniques that the reader probably isn’t consciously aware of, except to perceive that “something” isn’t working – like plot structure, inciting incident, goals, conflicts, stakes, etc.

Yup, I’d agree with both of you! When the elements are working as they should, the reader isn’t paying conscious attention to them. They work their magic. It’s only when something isn’t working that we notice it. Same with all the arts, I’d venture to say … music, film, etc. We can’t always articulate why we like something, why it moved us. The explanations we give, when asked, are never the whole story …

Well, I was heartsick to see I was in the bottom 6% who ranked the quality of the writing to be the most significant, or at least near the top. We often have this discussion in our book club which leaves me wondering about the choices we’ve made for our reading list. Now I understand.

I can name three recently read, and hyped, NYT best sellers with modest, at best, prose. The English language is so rich, why not use the tools available.

One simple answer to “The English language is so rich, why not use the tools available” The mass readership (NYT noted novels plugged big time) represent the average mass reader who cannot handle good literature. Quite a few good UK authors have cut big words from manuscripts, have shortened sentences, cut out the use of colons and semis because readers don’t understand the extensive range of those two punctuation marks, Anything a little complicated, archaic dialogue and many US readers go to town against UK authors with criticisms in reference to bad grammar. Over here in the UK we appreciate regional dialect within HR novels = Hardy and Austen style prose which is wholly devoid of Americanisms unless the character is an American. Regency England set novels and earlier coming out of Harper Collins and other top US HR imprints dominate the charts/bookshelves, and most are merely fancy dress novels lacking historical merit. Nothing to cause a reader to say, “I never knew that.”

A P.S. to Francine’s comment: I was fascinated to see how many people mentioned that “learning something new” was a one of the reasons they loved a novel. Not “description” per se, but being let into a world or time or way of life they hadn’t known about.

I agree with the preceding commentator, Susan Setteducato, when she says “I can’t speak to the accuracy of your findings, but my gut tells me that they have validity.” That is certainly how I react as a reader. And I think most of us writers remember our reactions as readers and tend to write stuff that would satisfy the reader in us.

The problem arises with agents and publishers, the professionals of the trade. Unlike most of us, they’re immersed every day in an avalanche of stories, a tsunami coming at them, and to stop the onslaught, they can’t enjoy what they read or see of something happens by page 20 (as most readers do when they pick up a book), they have to STOP it RIGHT NOW! They have to decide the value of the book in a matter of 2 pages, not 20, just to keep their sanity and keep going.

Clearly, that’s not the way we readers react to books. And I must thank you for quantifying that difference with your survey – fascinating! Hey, you should write a book about it, with a “counter survey” of what makes agents decide…

This said, I hope agents read your survey and begin to think about it. It might help them not pass up gems (many do as we know from the stories of best selling novels rejected dozens of times before finding an agent or publisher).

Agents should probably set themselves up differently, i.e. not rely on a single reader (the agent) overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of manuscripts! Perhaps they should delegate the first read to a group of readers? I don’t know what they should do exactly, but they need to do it differently if they want novel-writing to survive the challenge of movies/TV series…

It’s complicated, isn’t it? I didn’t mean to vilify agents, who are trying to make ends meet like the rest of us. They have to make choices about how to spend their time and energy, within the context of an imperfect system. Not am I intending to say that writing teachers are full of rubbish when they tell us to hook a reader quickly, to set up a compelling story question right away (a through-line) that will carry the reader’s mind and emotions all the way to the end of the book. Some books definitely work that way! But do they all? While most of watch a move straight through, we don’t read books that way, so perhaps there are different tempos and possibilities?

Political polls have lately proved to be so wrong (see 2016) that I now do my best to ignore them. This sort of applies–for me–to your small-sample study. But I’ll say this: the contrast you note between what matters to readers vs what matters to writers/agents rings true. I suspect the emphasis given to openings is driven by agents. That way, they can reject in seconds, not minutes, and click on the next manuscript sample.

For sure, this little survey only represented people who took the trouble to respond to my question and might not represent the majority of readers! I thinks its utility is in opening up the question, not in offering any answers :-)

Thanks for a really instructive article. It certainly rings true with me. So many different motivations and expectations can be confusing for writer, agent, and reader. As writers, all we can do is do our best and hope to connect.

I’d agree, Bernie. In the end, we need to stay true to what we want to express—and to respect that vision enough to seek to bring it to life in the best way we can. But we can’t predict or control how others will respond. We don’t always know whom we’ve reached. We may never know …

1) No one “reason for loving a book” was reported by more than 25% of respondents. This could indicate a wide variety of tastes in readers, or it could be a result of the study design. In an open-ended question on Facebook, people aren’t going to articulate all of the reasons they might love a story. I’d be interested in seeing the results of a checkbox or Likert scale question with each of these categories as options.

2) The results indicate that why people buy books and why they love books are two different things. If people don’t decide whether to read a book based on the first pages, why do they decide to read it? Probably because the cover and description were intriguing, it’s a book from an author they’ve read or heard about before, their friends recommended it, they saw a good review of it in a newspaper they trust, they saw a trailer for the movie or Netflix show based on it, etc.

In other words, marketing sells books. People decide to read because of the brand, the packaging, the “hype.” They can only love a story later, after they’ve immersed themselves in it.

You make so many interesting points! I agree that “why do you buy a book” and “why do you love a book” are two different questions. (And publishers may not separate them.) We may expect to love a book when we buy it, but that doesn’t always happen! As far as your other question, about posing an open-ended question … that was deliberate. I spent many years as a qualitative researcher and prefer to see what people say, rather than setting up pre-determined categories which inevitably omit certain ideas and suggest others. A followup study, taking the elements that people identified and THEN asking folks to rank them, would certainly be interesting! On the other hand, I suspect that people like different books for different reasons …

The contrast between agents/publishers and readers is why I buy so many self-published books. Sometimes I’m disappointed, but often I’m not.
As a writer, I try to make the first chapter interesting enough to grab the reader. As a reader, I’ll almost always give the writer three chapters to pull me in.

I expect that different readers draw a conclusion at different points about whether to continue reading. And it probably varies by book, genre, and mood. That’s why “rules” about how quickly that grab must happen need to be questioned. Personally, I’ve gotten halfway through many books and then set them aside. To a publisher, the book was a “success” because I bought it. But to me as a reader, it wasn’t.

As a traditionally published novelist and avid reader, the discrepancy you describe makes sense to me. Agents, publishers, and readers are all motivated by different factors, and they will fall in love (or not) with a work of fiction for different reasons. It’s an unfortunate reality because it stops many potentially great books from coming into the world, but I think the same thing can be said for other art forms such as painting and music.
Voice is a key ingredient for me in any work of fiction, but for a less experienced reader who pics up a book desperately seeking to relate to the characters, prose may be the last thing they think or care about.
Thank you for this article, it gives me a whole new perspective!

Hi Andrea,
I’m so glad this was food for thought! It was for me too …
As you point out, it’s a matter of motivation (what the reader is looking for). I suspect that agents might sometimes fall in love with a book, on a personal level, yet worry about its marketability and thus decide to pass. So they are reading with a different purpose and lens than the average reader … on the other hand, if you think about the logic of this closely, there isn’t any! I don’t know the answers either but am interested in opening up the question!

Last year, I spent about 7 months reviewing self-published books for a website called onlinebookclub.org. The site was also a reading and reviewing community. All reviews were available to all members and comments were expected and part of the system by which you were ranked (and therefore paid).

For me, the most astonishing thing was that most of the readers did not care about anything craft related. They didn’t care about poor writing, massive telling with little showing, flaccid middles, poor structure, POV shifting, endings with no ending, or anything else that we learn about in order to be traditionally published.

In fact, there was a ‘rule” that if there were more than 10 errors (typos and formatting) in a book, a perfect score should not be given. This rule was flouted over and over again by reviewers. Why? The most common reason was a compelling story. Second was relating to a writer writing a biography. (And I read some very poorly written bios and memoirs.)

Dear Liz,
Yup, it seems that a compelling story that sweeps us up into its world is what matters most! It’s like watching a movie. We don’t care about the artistic camera angles and lighting if we’re caught up in the story. When they’re really bad, they might snag our attention and derail us for a moment, but when they work well, they become invisible, part of the total experience. Thanks for your comments!

Thank you for providing such great insight. I love stories with sweep and characters with whom I would like to have coffee or villains I’d love to shoot. I enjoy different writers for different reasons. Proust is nothing like Jeff Shaara, or Gabriel Maria Marquez like Carl Hiaassen, but I like them all for different reasons; they take me away and make me believe what they say. My favorite book is one you’ve never heard of and some of the Pulitzers? Zzzzzz. I don’t want to work hard enough to read Philip Roth.
I feel intimidated when I go to the library and see so many books on the shelves and how many go into the library BOOK SALE! But hearing what readers love is enlightening and reminds me why I both read and write.

Thanks for your comments, Annette! Like you, I think we like different books for different reasons, and at different times. Perhaps the takeaway from all this is for us, as writers, not to try to please everyone but to do our job as well, as we can with the confidence that there will be some readers who will love our books!

I once judged a contest where people submitted the first 20 pages of a manuscript. Never did the story get better in the second 10 pages. In a few, it got worse, because a story started with strong writing an interesting premise, and then went in circles with nothing happening. I’ve had that experience reading published novels as well. I’ve enjoyed the first chapter, but then lost interest in the second or third chapter when nothing much was happening. So based on my experience, I suspect that an agent who only reads the first five pages before deciding to reject something isn’t missing a lot of great work.

I don’t think agents expect a manuscript’s first page to have all the elements the story needs. But I do think they can often judge within the first five pages whether or not the story will be worth reading. Readers may automatically be more forgiving, because they expect a published novel to be worth reading, while agents see a lot of work that isn’t ready for publishing.

A couple of years ago, I did a reread project to see if the books I’d adored in my 20s (ages ago) still held up and what they had in common. I was shocked at the unevenness of craft across them, some were written quite badly. So, what was the common thread? The characters, particularly the heroines, reflected who I had wanted to be – strong, independent, adventuresome, humorous leaders who were able to surround themselves with found family of friends. If a book had that and not too many sexist moments (it was the 80s, there were always a few), then it was my beloved. Craft and wit were a plus, but truly only icing on the cake.